Oh but they tried that in the past -- those products had a consistent result of killing the whole market segment then themselves.

1. Windows CE PDAs -- almost completely replaced healthy PDA-oriented OS due to Windows name, then wiped out the first generation of non-phone PDAs due to being absolutely inadequate in all ways possible. Survivors were iPAQ (Windows CE/Mobile), Palm (PalmOS), Visor (PalmOS), Blackberry (Blackberry OS, a phone but from PDA generation).

2. Windows Mobile phones -- sold to carriers, disappointed users, lost all market to dumbphones and Symbian-based Nokia, then completely wiped out by iPhone.

3. Windows Phone phones -- Survive by being produced by zombified Nokia, can't get any presence on the market due to iPhone and Android competition.

If anything, competition from Microsoft causes people to hastily add features and polished look while infesting their products with boatloads of bugs and painting themselves into a corner as far as technology development is concerned. The best projects are those that ignore Microsoft completely, Linux among them.

what they could have done was not had GNOME 3 as an option or had them as exclusive options.

And that would create a massive mess of dependencies in weirdest places, along with a burden of supporting software that can not even be built and tested while some other software is installed, thanks to name conflicts. No, after this kind of sabotage by the original developers, the code is for all practical purposes dead.

Gentoo actually supports old packages (or at least did for a long time), however dependencies and lack of active development make it at best suitable for transition. The problem is, there is nothing to move to in the first place, new versions of GNOME are not going to be usable for the foreseeable future.